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View Post #431 (Link) |
Aspiring Author
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Canada
Posts: 719
Points: 30
Times Thanked: 142
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Issei Strawberry | David Mura
Taste this strawberry, spin it in motion on the whirl of your tongue, look west towards Watsonville or some other sleepy California town, spit and wipe your sleeve across your mouth, then bend down again, dipping and rising like a piston, like fire, like a swirling dervish, a lover ready to ravish this harvest, this autumn of thirty-one or eight or nine, years when, as everyone declines around you, as swing and Capra redefine an American dream, as some are deferred and some preferred, and some complain, and some confer and strike, and are stricken, are written out of history, you have managed your own prosperity, a smacking ripeness on the vine, acres and acres you mine as your own, as your children's whose deed it is, knowing you own nothing here, you're no one here but your genes, the ones who spit back so readily in English on their tongues, tart and trickier, phrases that blow past you, winking, even as they sink in, you're losing them, you're gaining a harvest, a country, a future so much to lose when, in biting your tongue, the red juice flows between your teeth with the strawberries of loam and sweat, of summers in the valley when you made it before the war had come. |
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View Post #432 (Link) |
Global Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: To the laboratory!
Posts: 1,982
Points: 30
Times Thanked: 193
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Shower, Storm, Shooting Stars
Matthew Murrey For the third time in my life I got in a cold car, and drove away from the lights of town—twice for the Perseids, and this time for the Leonids. Each time I’d gone hoping for something spectacular. The first two were nothing but a slow wheeling sky of stars— this time, three faint streaks of light in the half hour I lay on the hood of the car trying to keep my neck loose, trying to keep my backside warm. It wasn’t fireworks, or even fireflies. It was just the beginning of dawn: soft fade of light seeping up, a fat, yellowed moon settling down, and three shooting stars for luck. Nothing to come home talking about, nothing to remember on my deathbed— unless dying turns out to be like lying on the hood of a car in the cold, staring up into the dark, hoping for a dazzle of shooting stars. |
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View Post #433 (Link) |
Global Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: To the laboratory!
Posts: 1,982
Points: 30
Times Thanked: 193
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View Post #434 (Link) |
Freelance Writer
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Bristol, England
Posts: 1,284
Points: 5.47
Times Thanked: 114
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Love is Like a Bottle of Gin by Stephin Merritt
It makes you blind, it does you in It makes you think you're pretty tough It makes you prone to crime and sin It makes you say things off the cuff It's very small and made of glass And grossly over advertised It turns a genius into an ass And makes a fool think he is wise It could make you regret your birth Or turn cartwheels in your best suit It costs a lot more than it's worth And yet there is no substitute They keep it on a higher shelf The older and more pure it grows It has no color in itself But it can make you see rainbows You can find it on the Bowery Or you can find it at Elaine's It makes your words more flowery It makes the sun shine, makes it rain You just get out what they put in And they never put in enough Love is like a bottle of gin But a bottle of gin is not like love |
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View Post #435 (Link) |
Global Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: To the laboratory!
Posts: 1,982
Points: 30
Times Thanked: 193
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Hello Morning
by Ellen Bass Little maple taking shape against my window, night’s dark gauze falling from your limbs. Hello bird whose name I don’t know. Wing feathers louvering open, first light shining through as they lift. And curled tea leaves sleeping in your tin. There you are, my dead mother in your red lacquer frame. You once carried the sea home in a jar and held out a spoonful to me each day. And you baby chicks, peeping when I pull back the towel from your cage, pecking corn mash, sipping water, raising your beaks so the water slides down your throats. The Times folded in the driveway, The Dow breaking 16,000. Minimum wage at $7.25. In China, minks and foxes are skinned alive. An artist has sculpted them in clay— sticking in a needle for each hair. In Toronto, an anesthesiologist is found guilty of putting his penis in the mouths of twenty-one women behind the blue drape of the operating table. There are the ten thousand beautiful things and the ten thousand terrible things the Buddha said we must open our hearts to. Dear breasts. Half a century ago I wrapped you in black lace and a boy laughed, astonished this was all for him. Welcome cracked spines of paperbacks, pearls with a broken clasp. My neighbor is down on his knees, scissoring the grass around the daffodils. Hushed children of the world, your green bones broken, yellow bruises blooming. Hello to the shovel leaning on the fence and to the excellent grave my son dug for the dog—so deep I had to stretch flat, to lower her body. I’m listening, Mozart. You make a world in which loss is bearable. Good morning, my mother-in-law. You still know my voice. I love you forever, we say, over and over. Speech burned down to these embers. My daughter is just now boarding a plane for an ice-slicked coast, looking for a doctor to save her. Rose petals have fallen into the grooves of our beat-up truck bed, verses of pink blossoms against the rusted paint. There are only a hundred elements. The same chord shivering through everything. I should have been kinder to the man who sat beside me at the D league basketball game. He was so lonely he wouldn’t stop talking. I never even took a good look at him. Only the cat hair silvering his dark pants. Hello my jacket. Maybe happiness is nothing more than how much pleasure I can take from the act of zipping your little metal teeth together. |
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View Post #436 (Link) |
Scholarly Apprentice
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Charlottesville, VA
Posts: 234
Points: 20
Times Thanked: 41
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Chaclid Wasps Emerging
Ellen Bass I like to stare into the microscope at the cluster of eggs Janet found on the hollyhock growing by the shed and reared in a petri dish amid the clutter on the kitchen counter. Their shells are lined in tight, neat rows, most empty now, tops sheared off like soft-boiled eggs, minute wasps hatched and gone. Yet one lies dead on its side, frozen where it fell— metallic green body, bright yellow legs— perfect, gem-like, as if to illustrate its kind. Another is caught halfway out, like a woman jumping from a cake, upper body gleaming, arms raised, glamorous. One freed only its head, huge eyes glistening with silvery mold. And the last had just, when breath stopped, stabbed both antennae through the dome as if forever sensing the air. Every time I look, they are still trapped there, as though buried in a past ice age, only now exposed. Half a million species—the smallest of the small— each burning its own brief blaze. |
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View Post #437 (Link) |
Global Moderator
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: To the laboratory!
Posts: 1,982
Points: 30
Times Thanked: 193
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90 North
BY RANDALL JARRELL At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe, I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard, My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole. There in the childish night my companions lay frozen, The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat, And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling, Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest. —Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence Of the unbroken ice. I stand here, The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare At the North Pole . . . ................................... And now what? Why, go back. Turn as I please, my step is to the south. The world—my world spins on this final point Of cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds End in this whirlpool I at last discover. And it is meaningless. In the child's bed After the night's voyage, in that warm world Where people work and suffer for the end That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land I reached my North and it had meaning. Here at the actual pole of my existence, Where all that I have done is meaningless, Where I die or live by accident alone— Where, living or dying, I am still alone; Here where North, the night, the berg of death Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness, I see at last that all the knowledge I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me— Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain. |
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View Post #438 (Link) Doomsday |
Novice Writer
Join Date: Jul 2016
Posts: 14
Points: 5
Times Thanked: 0
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The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens. Out painted stages fall apart by scenes While all the actors halt in mortal shock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans. Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens. Fractured glass flies down in smithereens; Our lucky relics have been put in hock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans. The monkey's wrench has blasted all machines; We never thought to hear the holy cock: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens. Too late to ask if end was worth the means, Too late to calculate the toppling stock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans, The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens. Sylvia Plath |
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View Post #439 (Link) |
Freelance Writer
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Geneva
Posts: 1,252
Points: 1.23
Times Thanked: 78
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Starting this again
[Love] BY ARIANA REINES Love Is an interruption or an aberration, a force in opposition to the ultimate inertia of the universe, Wrote Marguerite Duras. Whether or not it is worth it it occurs. Whether or not it is to be believed it is. The wind moves us without a frond being needed to be held by a slave girl. The rudiments of sentences are ancient without a mouth needing to remember what it is losing as it lets those words out, something eviller than what they even mean right now, something too evil to be known right now Or ever. I feel sure that even the most culpable people have other qualities secreted away Adjusting their garments in light of fate He turned his head upward, he looked up the white wall. The light from the lamp could be light coming from a great distance, it could be a great distance away, and the wall could be snow it is so beautiful, he said. His head looking up the wall, his eyes looking up it, he said, that nail in the wall could also be beautiful, for so far away.
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View Post #440 (Link) |
Freelance Writer
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Geneva
Posts: 1,252
Points: 1.23
Times Thanked: 78
|
Children Walk on Chairs to Cross a Flooded Schoolyard
Patrick Rosal Taytay, Rizal Province, Philippines (based on the photo by Noel Celis) Hardly anything holds the children up, each poised mid-air, barely the ball of one small foot kissing the chair’s wood, so they don’t just step across, but pause above the water. I look at that cotton mangle of a sky, post-typhoon, and presume it’s holding something back. In this country, it’s the season of greedy gods and the several hundred cathedrals worth of water they spill onto little tropic villages like this one, where a girl is likely to know the name of the man who built every chair in her school by hand, six of which are now arranged into a makeshift bridge so that she and her mates can cross their flooded schoolyard. Boys in royal blue shorts and red rain boots, the girls brown and bare-toed in starch white shirts and pleated skirts. They hover like bells that can choose to withhold their one clear, true bronze note, until all this nonsense of wind and drizzle dies down. One boy even reaches forward into the dark sudden pool below toward someone we can’t see, and at the same time, without looking, seems to offer the tips of his fingers back to the smaller girl behind him. I want the children ferried quickly across so they can get back to slapping one another on the neck and cheating each other at checkers. I’ve said time and time again I don’t believe in mystery, and then I’m reminded what it’s like to be in America, to kneel beside a six-year-old, to slide my left hand beneath his back and my right under his knees, and then carry him up a long flight of stairs to his bed. I can feel the fine bones, the little ridges of the spine with my palm, the tiny smooth stone of the elbow. I remember I’ve lifted a sleeping body so slight I thought the whole catastrophic world could fall away. I forget how disaster works, how it can turn a child back into glistening butterfish or finches. And then they’ll just do what they do, which is teach the rest of us how to move with such natural gravity. Look at these two girls, center frame, who hold out their arms as if they’re finally remembering they were made for other altitudes. I love them for the peculiar joy of returning to earth. Not an ounce of impatience. This simple thrill of touching ground.
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